This is the grass – Alan Marshall

“I spent the mornings writing letters in answer to advertisements in the paper; in the afternoons I went for walks round the creek. I was experiencing a sense of freedom and elation that my failure to find work could not subdue. The renewing of my association with the clean world became almost an identification with tree and bird and sun. The sharpness of my pleasure in rediscovery was sometimes so intense I could have shouted and flung my arms wide or lain with my face against the earth listening to music only the enchanted hear.

Quartz gravel, dry gum-leaves, bleached twigs and pieces of bark were rich with meaning. The floor of the bush was a narrative poem, the bush an evocation.

Shadow and sunlight, reaching limbs of trees, the rustle of grass, shapes and colours and odours, demanded a complete absorption to uncover the heart of their beauty. I felt I had been imprisoned for a lifetime in a dungeon and now, freed, the revelation of a communicating beauty lying confined in all that I was seeing brought with it a frustrating awareness of my inability to release it so that it would surround men and women for ever. There was an anguish in this unattainable desire, and tear, and a sense of deprivation.

I wanted to proclaim my message, if not in books then by talking.

Sometimes I had attempted, when stirred by the sight of a spider orchid, maybe, or the flight of a bird, to take adults on a fanciful journey of the spirit, in search of a truth beyond what the eye was seeing. It demanded of them an emotional response suggestive of children and this they could rarely give. They associated it with immaturity.

Shielded by books and facts and their belief in accepted authorities, they were incapable of becoming participants in wonder, only kindly and critical observers of those experiencing it. The years of development they had left behind were sprinkled with stars – the sharp lights of remembered experiences. The same experiences in later years never created a light.

What was once a magical experience becomes commonplace with repetition and there comes a time in the lives of most people when the eyes and ears fail to register an unadulterated wonder and excitement, but are used as instruments to revive memories that flicker like a match for a moment and die away. It had all happened before; it would happen again. But I knew that each moment contained something unknown, something never experienced before, an enchantment only it could provide.”